The Oddities of Optimizing Your Great Vault
Is There an Issue With Gear?
Gear acquisition has been a hot topic recently in the community. Many players in the community have been asking for ways to target specific gear like we had in Season 4 of Shadowlands with the Puzzling Cartel Dinar Vendor. We also saw a tweet this past week from Scarizard noting that we would see an update on gear, tier, and other things going forward sometime soon. The reason this is a heated topic, however, is largely because Dragonflight introduced us to multiple “Very Rare” items such as Whispering Incarnate Icon and Neltharax, Enemy of the Sky.
How to Optimize Your Great Vault to Get Very Rare Items
Because these items seem to drop so rarely from the actual boss kills themselves (hence why they’re called “very rare”) some players have thought of some ways to get around this by trying to use The Great Vault to their advantage. While we don’t have specific drop rates to draw upon, it seems as though these “very rare” items aren’t actually that rare in The Great Vault and instead have the same chance at appearing in your vault as any other piece of loot from bosses that you’ve killed.
In order to specifically target these items, some players are aiming to only kill Eranog, Primal Council, Broodkeeper, and Raszageth on Mythic difficulty without killing any of the other 4 bosses so they don’t pollute their chances at obtaining these unique items. Because there are also 4 different bosses carrying these unique items it actually works out quite well, as it only takes 4 bosses to fill out 2 of your 3 Great Vault slots for raid.
The items you’re chasing are:
“Polluting” Your Great Vault
Items in your Great Vault are only drawn from bosses that you have killed on that specific difficulty (except for Tier items, in which case you can see any of those pieces without having actually killed the boss). This means if you kill Terros on Mythic difficulty, every single week from then onwards you are eligible to receive loot from Terros in a Mythic Great Vault slot. So, if your aim is to try to get these “Very Rare” items, it’s actually in your best interest to skip bosses such as Terros, Sennarth, Dathea, or Grimtotem. None of these bosses have these very rare items, and thus would only pollute your Great Vault with their loot pools.
Terros and Sennarth face an additional problem in that none of their gear is really wanted by anyone. Very early into the patch it was okay to get access to a few pieces of 415 gear (which, at the time, was a little hard to come by), however now we have access to the Revival Catalyst, Valor is uncapped, and profession gear can be upgraded to higher item level than these bosses, which means it’s far easier to get this gear from M+ or crafting instead. Neither of these bosses really drop any chase-worthy trinkets or anything either, which ultimately makes killing them feel pretty bad. Unfortunately, if you’ve killed these bosses, you’ve added 2 useless bosses worth of loot to your loot pool that the Great Vault draws from, which unfortunately lowers your chance at obtaining items that would actually be an upgrade for your character.
It’s nice that some of the early fights have some loot that make it worthwhile to go in and try to complete 2/8 Mythic, however having multiple bosses that characters would prefer to never kill feels quite bad. For a while it’s felt as though many of the good items are only at the very start or very end of the raid. It’s nice having the final boss give you that ‘extra prize’ so-to-speak, but there needs to be more incentive to killing some of the mid-tier bosses without feeling like you’re ultimately hurting your chances at getting gear that you want.
Class-Specific Versus Raid-wide Rare Items
Another issue with the current “very rare” items is the fact that nearly every single player in your 20-man raid wants to equip 3 out of the 4 items. Unlike the hunter bow Neltharax, Enemy of the Sky, you will eventually want access to 20 Whispering Incarnate Icon and 20 of each of the rare rings Seal of Diurna’s Chosen Seal of Filial Duty, compared to only having (at most) a couple of hunters in your raid group. This makes it especially hard for tanks and healers to get these items without utilizing this strategy involving the Great Vault to try to quickly hunt down these items, as they’re often given out items last. Fortunately, many groups have been doing 2/8 mythic runs now that cross-realm mythic is available, killing only Eranog and Primal Council as they’re the first 2 bosses of the raid.
Killing No Mythic Bosses
When final bosses drop weapons at higher item levels (especially if they have a unique effect) it poses the question: should you even kill other mythic bosses until you receive your weapon? This was first popular in Sanctum of Domination because the final 2 bosses dropped multiple weapons at the highest possible item level. For rogues, hunters, and 2-handed users the weapons even had unique effects: Edge of Night for rogues, Rae’shalare, Death’s Whisper for hunters, and Jaithys, the Prison Blade for 2-handed users. This meant that if you were one of those classes, your best bet at obtaining these items was to actually kill Kel’thuzad and Sylvanas each week until you received your loot, then you would be able to go back and reclear the rest of the raid. In Sepulcher of the First people tried this because Gavel of the First Arbiter was incredibly strong and casters often used Antumbra, Shadow of the Cosmos as well. This gearing strategy became even more popular in Season 4 since, instead of your normal 8-10 bosses of loot for your Great Vault to choose from, you would eventually have access to nearly 30 bosses of loot in your Great Vault. Now in Vault of the Incarnates it is becoming an increasingly popular strategy, even in Heroic, because Neltharax, Enemy of the Sky is such a strong item for hunters. If players only have a small loot pool for their Great Vault to choose from, then they have a much higher chance at seeing that item from their Great Vault and it is in their best interest to kill as few mythic bosses as possible.
I think going forward if they want to keep these three ‘tiers’ of loot (415, 421, 424) then they need to make sure some of the early bosses have some items you actually want. For example, killing Terros would feel much better if instead some good trinkets like Manic Grieftorch or Storm-Eater’s Boon dropped off of him. Otherwise, we’re far more likely to end up in the scenario we’re at now, where guilds are actively dodging bosses like Terros and Sennarth on their alts simply because they don’t want their loot to pollute their vault.
Does Deterministic Gear Solve This Issue?
We saw something similar to this for 2-handed users in Season 3 and 4 of Shadowlands with Gavel of the First Arbiter being such a strong item. Before Season 4 introduced the Puzzling Cartel Dinar system for players to specifically target pieces of gear, 2-handed users were trying to only kill The Jailer on their alts as one of their only Mythic bosses so that they had a higher chance of the rare weapon showing up in their Great Vault. Once the Puzzling Cartel Dinar system was added in though, most 2-handed users spent their Puzzling Cartel Dinar on a Gavel of the First Arbiter because it was their single-largest upgrade they could get and didn’t have to hope to see it drop in raid or in their vault every week. For other classes that didn’t have these powerful rare items, they simply targeted good trinkets or high item level weapons instead. The Puzzling Cartel Dinar System allowed you to get the powerful gear that you hoped to obtain without having to wait weeks and weeks for it to maybe drop, which could help alleviate the current pain points of trying to get these “very rare” items on a character that hasn’t gotten them yet but has already killed all of the mid-tier bosses.
